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The West Reading the Other Traditions

Whether other peoples had philosophy, and in what sense, Western writers have answered differently over time, and their answers have a history of their own, beside the Western line. The question is at least as old as Diogenes Laertius, who opened his Lives against those who said “that the study of philosophy had its beginning among the barbarians” (I.1, tr. Hicks). From the seventeenth century the histories of philosophy took it up again: the Jesuits called Confucius a philosopher, Leibniz held Europe beaten in practical philosophy, and Brucker gave the “barbarian” and “exotic” philosophies their own books. Between about 1780 and 1830 the histories narrowed the field to the Greeks and their heirs, on a concept of eigentliche Philosophie, philosophy proper, a term Wilhelm Halbfass traces to the historian Tiedemann. From the 1830s to the 1950s Western writers placed other peoples outside history or before logic; comparative philosophy set out to compare instead; and the disputes of the present ask what the name should cover.

These pages hold the Western side of the question: the judgements made in Europe and its universities about other traditions. How each tradition understood its own work, and how it received the West’s word for it, is on its own pages under Metaphilosophy.

The pages

English without a named translator is rendered from the original.

Open interest — 1655 to 1744: the old question of philosophy’s origin, the Jesuits’ Confucius, Leibniz on Chinese practical philosophy, Wolff’s Halle oration, Brucker’s barbarian and exotic philosophy.
Philosophy proper — 1786 to the 1830s: Meiners, Kant, Tiedemann, Tennemann and Hegel begin philosophy with the Greeks; Schlegel and Schopenhauer read India against the current.
The colonial frame — Hegel on Africa and America, Renan on “Arab” philosophy, Lévy-Bruhl’s prelogical mentality, and Tempels’s Bantu philosophy as Europe read it.
Comparative philosophy — Masson-Oursel’s analogy, Jaspers’s parallel beginnings, the East–West Philosophers’ Conferences and Moore’s world philosophy.
The present disputes — whether there was philosophy in India, China, Japan, Africa, the Americas and the Islamic world, as Western scholars have argued it, and Garfield and Van Norden on the departments.